Google has revealed its latest changes to Google Translate, including the addition of 24 new languages. Among them is Luganda. Luganda is used by about 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda.
Alongside the technology, Google has enlisted the help of native speakers and linguists to help refine the translations.
According to the developers, the new languages aren’t the world’s most common languages, but some are used by millions of people across the globe.
These new languages are the first the company has added to the service using its Zero-Shot Machine Translation technology. It’s a machine learning model that can learn to translate words into another language without having to see any examples.
Google hasn’t shared details on how this works, but it’s a technology the company has been talking about since 2016.